| Home Making |
Chapter 9 |
Page 3 |
If you hold a polished shell to your ear you shall hear as from within it a strange sound like the distant roar of the ocean. You can hear it said by people with fine imaginative powers that this shell once lay by the shore of the sea, and that the sounds you hear as you hold it to your ear are the treasured echoes and old memories of the wild waves’ thunder which it carries hidden in its recesses. But when you have made a few experiments with the shell this pretty fancy vanishes. You lay it on a table and apply to your ear, and then you do not hear the sound at all. It is only when you hold it in your hand that you hear the strange murmur. So the fact is learned that it is only the quivering of your own fingers, the throbbing of your own pulses against the hollow, resonant shell that makes the sound. In like manner, the music which we hear as our years go on, whether it be sweet or discordant, is but the pulse beat of our own hearts. We may think it comes from outside, and we may blame our circumstances if we are unhappy, but really it is the moan of the memories of our own past lives that saddens us.
What is true of our individual lives is true also of our homes. We are making their memories day by day and year by year, and what they shall be in the future will depend on the home life we are living now. We may make our home a palace, filling it with delights, covering the walls with beautiful pictures, planting flowers to fill the halls and chambers with fragrance, and hanging cages of singing birds everywhere to pour out sweet notes of song; or we may cover the walls with hideous images and ghastly specters to look down upon us, and plant only briers and thorns about the doors to flaunt themselves in our faces when we sit in the gloom of life’s nightfall. We may make the memories of our home so tender, so precious, so sacred, that each life that goes out of our doors shall carry a blessing upon it wherever it moves. Or we may make its memories a perpetual pillow of thorns for our heads, a burden of bitterness and anguish which shall never be lifted or removed.
Page 3
<< Prior Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Next Page >>